The Colorado Avalanche signed its most important restricted free agent a day before the market opens.

Sam Malinski and the Avs agreed to a one-year, $1.4 million contract for the 2025-26 season, according to a league source, shoring up the team’s defensive depth while also keeping Malinski off the NHL market.

Colorado isn’t expected to be big shoppers when free agency begins Tuesday, but the Avs do have more salary cap flexibility than they’ve had in recent seasons. The Avs don’t typically make splashy signings in early July, opting instead to find talent externally through trades, and that could again be the case this summer.

It’s possible Colorado’s top six forwards, top five defensemen and both goaltenders in the opening-night lineup are already on the roster following the Malinski deal. Of the 17 players currently on one-way contracts, only one has been acquired with an early July free-agent deal: forward Parker Kelly, who signed a two-year pact on July 1, 2024.

“Every situation is different,” Avalanche general manager Chris MacFarland said Saturday after the 2025 NHL draft. “Obviously, the advantage to free agency is you’re just giving up money and you can hold onto your assets. … We’ll look at all avenues over the next few days and see if we can improve the roster.”

The Avs now have $8.325 million in cap space available with 10 forwards, five defensemen and two goalies signed to one-way contracts. One of those forwards, Logan O’Connor, is expected to miss the start of the 2025-26 campaign after offseason hip surgery.

Colorado was short on cap space until it traded Charlie Coyle and Miles Wood to the Columbus Blue Jackets last week — a move that cleared $7.75 million off the books for this upcoming season and $2.5 million in each of the following three years.

The Avs have several players who will become unrestricted free agents at midnight Tuesday, including forwards Jonathan Drouin, Joel Kiviranta and Jimmy Vesey, plus defensemen Ryan Lindgren and Erik Johnson. Drouin’s agent, Allan Walsh of Octagon Hockey, tweeted Sunday that Drouin will be testing the market.

Drouin and the Avs have had a mutually beneficial relationship the past two seasons.

Drouin was able to rebuild his value as a productive, two-way impact forward, while the team had him on a below-market contract. Drouin should find a healthy raise from the $2.5 million he made this past season.

Opening up the extra cap space could allow the Avs to still bring Lindgren and/or Kiviranta back, depending on what the market looks like for both players. Kiviranta had a career year on a league-minimum contract and should finally get a deal with some term attached to it.

Lindgren could be a fascinating player to watch. He had better results playing in a lesser role with the Avalanche after a midseason trade than he had while on the New York Rangers’ top pairing for several years.

A couple of defensemen with similar styles of play — Calgary’s and Nicolas Hague, newly acquired in Nashville — have signed contracts worth at least $5.5 million per season. There’s an argument that Lindgren, who just finished a contract at $4.5 million per year, is better than both players, but he is indisputably not as good at being very tall.

A clear trend in the NHL right now is clubs wanting big, heavy defensemen. Lindgren plays the game the way NHL GMs want their defense-first defensemen to, but he’s listed at 6-foot, not 6-foot-6 like his two peers mentioned above.

Malinski, who will turn 27 years old next month, had five goals and 15 points in 76 games in his first full NHL season this past year for the Avs.

He is listed at 5-foot-11 and 190 pounds and signed as an undrafted free agent in March 2023 after four years at Cornell. He had three goals and 10 points in 23 games in 2023-24 before becoming a regular in the lineup this past season. He spent most of the year on the third pairing, but he moved up to the second when one of the top-four guys wasn’t available.

Finding someone to partner with Malinski is one of the key offseason objectives left for the Avs. So, too, is filling out the depth roles at forward as well. The Avs can be patient if they want, but also have the cap space to do so in the coming days as well.

Footnotes

The Avs also signed RFA goaltender Trent Miner to a two-year contract Monday. Miner, 24, made his NHL debut this past season and is the club’s No. 3 goalie behind Mackenzie Blackwood and Scott Wedgewood. He could have a looming battle with 2024 second-round pick Ilya Nabokov in 2026 for the backup role because Wedgewood is entering the final year of his contract.